Sunday, July 19, 2009

Readers! I have crazy news. CRAZY, I SAY! I solicited guest writers a little while ago and got a far larger response than I was expecting. So, rather than have to choose between a bunch of equally anonymous people, I decided "fuck this, let's let them do all my work" and so for the next few weeks we're going to have a new writer every comic. MADNESS ENSUES!

I'll give credit to Randall in that today's comic is mildly amusing and he keeps the joke short without having to explain it, even though the alt-text is retarded and he could have at least drawn a road to signify that the car is going somewhere.

Oh hey, you're right. I kind of misread it as "The windows file copy dialog visits some friends," and I had assumed the 'friends' to be other pieces of software, like sat-nav software and such. Which it then.. contaminated or something, I don't know. I thought it was actually kind of a nice idea, until you pointed out that it's actually the guy acting like that.

I'll give credit to Randall in that today's comic is mildly amusing and he keeps the joke short without having to explain it

Yeah, the joke itself sucks, but it's presented way, way better than usual. A quick setup, a punchline, no extraneous post-punch dialogue, no telegraphing of the joke. The alt-text is pretty balls, but nobody's perfect.

That's three comics in a row that didn't make me lose hope for humanity! Randy, you get a gold star.

Actually, since the person in the comic is the AUTHOR of the Windows Copy Dialog, it's incorrect (and stupid) to just say it's a "humans acting like machines" joke. The comic suggests exactly the opposite: the Windows time estimation is so bad because its author actually thinks like that. It's not such an otherworldly concept.The only fault I can see with today's strip is the fact that it should have been done 10 years ago, not TODAY. But, heck, I still laughed.

I thought it would have been a cute joke ten years ago. Though much like angry Apple fans editing laptop hunter ads http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE_LOoEYbF0 to have BSODs on the end, Randall just looks out of touch here.

Fernie, that's a valid argument - but consider - in real life the author of that dialog does not behave like this. Randall is merely giving an explanation of why Man is acting like machine here, so I think it fits very well in that man/machine category, because even with explanation, it's just a man behaving like a machine.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.